★★ No sooner had the gray
lifted and one’s guard lowered than the blue sky went away and
snowflakes fell again. A rainy-day dampness was on the air. An
oncoming extra-wide stroller filled all the space between
snowbanks. A man walked by wearing bright blue-white low-top canvas
sneakers, the toes gravely besmirched with slush-grime. Downtown
the sun was coming out but the sidewalks were even slushier. Stray
snowflakes still blew down, so bright in the sunshine it seemed as
if they ought to have melted. By early afternoon the sky was clear
and everything was dripping. The melt had come on so fast that the
little islands of surviving snow in the wet bicycle lane hadn’t had
a chance to lose their whiteness. In the intense shade and shelter
of Jersey Street, the snow looked new-fallen. Back uptown, the sun
shone on the red eye of a white pigeon, and on the thin stream of
water pouring from a scaffold, landing with a rattle and spray
on the top trash bag in a curbside pile.

Running at 104 minutes, shot like a TED talk and with echoes of
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Chai’s film discusses the
damaging impact of pollution on health, and she discusses how her
own infant daughter had to have an operation straight after birth
to remove a benign tumor.

“This is a personal issue between me and the smog,” Chai says in
the movie.

The movie has reached more than 200 million views on Chinese
websites, not counting Wechat or other social media, which makes
for nearly one-third of China’s online population of 649
million.

Of all the winter squashes,
my favorite is the spaghetti squash, because it is a weird mutant
that makes no sense. What possible reason could it have to produce
a fruit that transforms from rock hard when raw to silky strands
when soft? What is the point? Some mysteries are unsolvable. Or,
like, maybe this one has been solved and I just can’t be bothered
to look up the answer.

In any case, spaghetti squash is a wonderful fruit. It take
weeks to go bad, so just look for one that feels heavy—this means a
higher sugar content—and doesn’t have any soft spots. It’s hard to
mess up buying a spaghetti squash. It is also fantastically
healthful; it has few calories, but high levels of fiber, vitamin A
and C, and potassium, and it’s extremely high in beta carotene,
which is probably good for your skin and eyeballs.

Typically the spaghetti squash is treated as if it were
spaghetti, topped with tomato sauce and that kind of thing. This is
an okay way to eat it, but because spaghetti squash lacks the
starch of pasta, the squash will never really absorb sauce or be
coated with sauce in the same way, which can lead to watery dishes.
Spaghetti squash is in a category of its own, a crisp-tender mildly
sweet filler. According to my cursory searches of Pinterest and
food blogs, though, spaghetti squash is often cooked incorrectly.
Here is a popular way it is cooked and also a way in which you
should never, ever cook it.

I am
currently in the process of working with my CPA on my 2014 taxes.
Having had no experience with CPAs prior to last year, I did not
know what to expect, and in many ways the process has been about
adjusting my (overambitious) expectations. I think I thought my CPA
meeting would be an in-depth conversation about every aspect of my
business, a combination “tax prep and business health” service, and
it turned out to be much more “let’s look at the problem in front
of us, which is inputting numbers into your 2014 tax return.”

Here are some examples of my expectations vs. reality:

Expectation: My CPA meeting would take, at
minimum, two hours, and we’d discuss both my income and my
deductions in detail.

Reality: My CPA meeting took about 15 minutes—”You’re a
freelancer with some 1099s and some deductions? We can handle
that.”—and the rest of it is me sending additional documentation
over email.

Expectation: I’d have to provide proof of every
number I brought to the conversation. Some of my clients, for
example, don’t send me 1099s because I only wrote one feature for
them and it didn’t cross the minimum income threshold. So I showed
up at my CPA meeting with a stack of printed-out bank transactions
to accompany my 1099s, to prove that I had earned the income I’m
claiming.

Reality: My CPA wasn’t too worried about
whether or not I had proof to back up the numbers I brought him. He
also wasn’t interested in seeing the receipts for the deductions
I’m planning to claim. I do have this documentation if anyone might
need it in the future, but there’s also a part of me that’s
thinking “Wait, I could say anything and it would go
on my taxes? I could say that I stayed at a more
expensive hotel during that business trip and claim a bigger
deduction?”

I mean, obviously I am not going to do that, but I’m very
curious if your CPAs also accept your income and
deduction statements without asking to see original
receipts. Part of me wants to bring in all of the receipts just so
someone else can make sure I added them up correctly. I
usually run everything twice on my phone’s calculator app, just to
make sure the sums match, but, you know, what if I made a mistake
somewhere?

Andy Stott’s Faith in Strangers may have been the best album of
2014, and Panda Bear’s “Mr.
Noah” is one of those songs I have listened to a hundred times
and still not figured out enough to get bored of yet, so this
meeting of the two on a remix of “Boy’s Latin” from Panda Bear
Meets The Grim Reaper is something that I expected to enjoy.
What I was not prepared for was just how scary and hopeless it
sounds: It’s full of gray, grim menace and a sense that escape is
impossible. It is, if we are thinking seasonally, the perfect
Song of Winter. And seeing as
winter will never end you should probably get used to listening
to this for the rest of your life. Enjoy, if such a thing is
possible.

“LaCroix is not as exhilarating as taking ecstasy at Joshua
Tree, blanketed by a glittering velveteen sky, but, boy, do I get
stoked when I’ve remembered to pack one for the movie theater. And
now that I’m free of a constant low-grade hangover, I’m left with a
lot of time to just walk around, extra alert. I see all of us now.
The truth is, for every dork that buys Sriracha-branded knee socks
at Urban Outfitters, there’s a mid-30s lady quaffing crates of
flavored soda water because that’s her ‘thing.'”
—As we age we find our
joy in surprising places.#

★★★★ The snow was, at
first and for a moment, nothing more than an extra gray on the
grayness. On close inspection, it manifested itself against the
dark neighboring balcony railing as a very few little flakes moving
nowhere particular. Then behind those there was something like a
driving mist, innumerable tiny flakes moving sharply northward, and
soon not so tiny. By early afternoon the flakes were big and
dropping straight down, laying a solid new coat on everything,
March arriving fluffy and white. The three-year-old swabbed it up
with a mitten, down to bare sidewalk, and had to be quickly stopped
from eating what he’d gathered. Then he went sprinting off through
the white in his lately hand-me-down boots, with the spider pattern
in unlicensed Spider-Man colors. The toe of a hard old snowbank
tripped him and he bounced up unfazed. He mountaineered along the
ridge of old ice, stooped at a corner to try to make snowballs of
the unsticky fluff. The wind was coming east on the cross street
and he ran into it, squinting his eyes and sticking his tongue down
and out. In the forecourt he went down on all fours to plow a path,
and the snow quickly filled it in behind him. “It looks like Luke
Skywalker is on the planet Hoth,” he said, mounting the low wall to
knock accumulation out of the leaves of the shrubbery. Flakes
landed on the smartphone screen and melted and scattered the pixel
colors, like tiny costume-jewelry gemstones. As four approached, it
was impossible to tell exactly where the curb was on the
jaywalk with the seven-year-old across Amsterdam. The older
boy was less ostentatious about catching the snowflakes as he went,
but catch them he did: They were big enough to taste, he said, but
they only tasted like water. There was ice in them now, flicking
the exposed skin on the face. Outside the McDonald’s, a small dog
on a leash lunged and barked at a snowblower.

I remember reading only a few weeks before that day that women
often know when they are. Which makes sense. I kind of knew,
already. A week in, there was a phantom consciousness, a pulling
rod of unearthly heaviness, like a tingly sensation at the base of
my uterus. My cells were dancing, a flurry of aches, thudding with
an immutable dullness full of pain. I felt bloated—more than
usual—and there was a gnawing, an impenetrable nagging of fingers,
strangling me inside out.

You know how kids are always captivated by things? I was always
captivated by children, by motherhood, by that ball of existence
lodged inside a woman’s body for nine months. I would always ask my
mom how much it hurt when she had me, or what she craved to
eat—how long was labor, Mom? I wanted to be ready.

I had not had my period. Overwhelmed by everything, on a whim,
or even a dare with myself, I bought a pregnancy test. I was
shaking as I put it in my pockets.

I did the test at my best friend’s place. He was half awake when
I told him that I thought I might be pregnant. I took the test in
his bathroom, laughing at the charade of it all. Suddenly, in his
company—I was all bravado, the weak girl playing the part of “I’ve
got it all figured out.” I peed into a cup, left the stick in
there, and waited for it to turn any other color but pink. I wasn’t
a girl who got pregnant. I was smart. I was responsible. I was
appropriate. I was going to be a lawyer one day.

I always thought I’d be pregnant when I had a man to look after
me. A real man with a job. We’d have a house together. We’d have
bookshelves that reached the ceiling, and carpets from Afghanistan,
a record player that played smooth jazz as we did the New York
Times crossword together, cocooned, inseparable, drinking hot apple
cider from a shared mug. I always thought I’d be pregnant when I
was happy.

I was drifting off when I saw it. As I dreamt of swing sets a
sinking feeling devoured me. A desperate unparalleled fever
sickened through the crutches of my identity. I did not want this
baby.

I came from a good family.
I came from a good family.
I came from a good family.

You know how when you’re lying awake late at night and you can’t
fall asleep no matter how hard you try because you are troubled by
the bad choices you’ve made and the terrible things you’ve done and
the knowledge that now there’s no way out of the prison you’ve put
yourself into and you start to fantasize about how your life would
be better if you could somehow go back and do all the things
differently from the way you did them when you didn’t know any
better but the more you think about it the more you realize that
each decision you’ve made was predicated on an earlier, equally
poor decision going as far back as you can remember and you start
to understand that the only way anything could ever be okay for you
and the everyone you’ve hurt—which is everyone you know—is if you
were never born at all and so you shut your eyes and imagine a
world in which you never existed and you see that it is good and
you pull further out in your mind’s eye to view a vast unfathomable
galaxy filled with stars and flares and spirals all shining on
without you, finally you come to a state of brief but perfect,
merciful rest? I don’t know what it looks like in your head but
this is pretty much how I
picture it.#